The Ring -a- Ding Girl

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The green ranch house is midcentury, middle-class suburban. Its picture windows, once the pride of a wrong-armed infielder named Preston Ward (since departed for Kansas City), glare across the scrubby, rattlesnake-infested foothills toward the San Fernando Valley. As the Thunderbird flies, the place is 12 smoggy miles from the manicured canyons of Bel Air and Beverly Hills, where a movie star ought to live. By classical Hollywood standards, this pad is so far out that it might as well be in Oshkosh or Altoona or on a space platform, and the girl who lives there is even farther out--she is a real ring-a-ding.

She dresses like a color-blind D.P. from Dogpatch. She claims to comb her scraggle-cropped, copper-colored hair with an eggbeater, but in fact usually attacks it only with her fingers. Her income has grown to six figures, but she haunts bargain counters, a born haggler. She handles her car like a hopped-up hot-rodder, laces into the Los Angeles freeway competition with the voice and free-wheeling vocabulary of a longshoreman.

She collects rubber bands, bubble gum, matchboxes, unmatched gloves, old typewriter ribbons and dull pencils. She is prone to the sulks, unwinds by tossing dishes at her husband, and coddles a breakfast taste for hot fudge sundaes. All this, burbling forth from a lithe, long-legged, freckled, near-perfect frame (34-24-34), Puts Shirley MacLaine in a new category; expert Hollywood status seekers consider her so far out that she is in, way in. Shirley, at 25, is the brightest face, the freshest character and the most versatile new talent in Hollywood.

Happy Pixy. At first glance the situation seems appalling. Has the town that nourished the pneumatic legends of Theda Bara and Clara Bow and Jean Harlow sold out to a giggly beer drinker? Answers: "Yes," and "Why not?"

Her feet may be bigger (size 8 1/2) than most of the siren prints left behind in the Hollywood cement; she may have more freckles than the makeup department can cover; she may have a voice she herself describes as resembling "Merman trying to reach the candy stand in the lobby, except when I shift into high, and then it sounds like Lily Pons when she's kidding.'' But she also has a pair of long and memorable legs--"They start from the shoulders," says one admiring choreographer--and she can make them do anything she wants. She has the grace of a ballet dancer, the exuberance of a cheerleader and the muscle power of a baseball player; at various times she has been all three.

Her face, which she can work like a rubber mask, turns from sunny to sad, from Harlequin to Columbine, with imperceptible art. Her lips can tremble like a child's on the verge of tears or curl with three-martini irony; her blue eyes can blink in puppy-dog innocence or wink in complicity with all the world. Perhaps her most typical expression is that of a pixy hooked on happy pills, but she can also look like a small kitten that has just swallowed a very large canary, a waif who has lost her bus ticket home, a country girl trying to act like a vamp despite her wholesome apple cheeks.

"I don't care what the part is," says Director Vincente Minnelli, "she can do anything." Seeing her on the screen, Scenarist Dwight Taylor (Top Hat) was reminded of his mother, the late famed Actress Laurette Taylor. "The comparison is irresistible," he wrote Director Minnelli. "There are only a few over the years who can say 'I'm going out to buy a can of pork and beans' and find you choking up. Judy Holliday has a lot of that. And Shirley Booth's voice has some of it. But if I had a choice of a performance I'd want my mother to see--if she could come back for 80 minutes--I'd pick Shirley's in Some Came Running."

Blue-Eyed Hindu. Shirley MacLaine's success can be measured in more material terms. Her latest movie, Ask Any Girl (TIME, June 1), is climbing to the top of the box office totem pole largely because of her enchanting performance in a second-rate story. For her next picture, Can-Can, she will get $250,000, and she has just concluded another $250,000 deal with NBC for 15 TV specials--not bad for a girl who only a few years ago was a Broadway understudy at $110 a week.

Her rise was so rapid that it can be traced to her very first picture, The Trouble with Harry (1955), a Hitchcock exercise in ghoulish gaiety. She was the cute little widow who could help exhume and rebury her husband's corpse half a dozen times, looking fond, puzzled, but no more perturbed than the president of a garden club transplanting gardenias. Next came Artists and Models, one of the last joint Martin & Lewis enterprises, in which Shirley ("I was a forward comedienne in a yellow sunsuit") distinguished herself chiefly by becoming the first performer ever to steal a scene from Jerry Lewis. In Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), she tripped into a memorable bit of miscasting--Ouida, the Hindu princess. Despite wig and dark makeup. Shirley looked about as Indian as Miss Rheingold, but she had no regrets. "Golly," she wrote a New York roommate about Producer Mike Todd, "he never came within three feet of pinching me."

In that picture she never came within three feet of acting, either, but The Sheepman, a run-of-the-range western, took her out of saris and put her in Levi's, which did more for her figure. And in The Matchmaker she had a chance to be funny again, as a naive, man-shy milliner, and in Some Came Running, opposite Frank Sinatra, she came close to salvaging a silly story with her portrayal of a pigeontoed, sentimental, small-town trollop. Says Sinatra : "When the idea of casting her came up, I just about fell over, because we'd never thought about her. When we started shooting. I knew she was going to be tremendous. Very few girls could jump in my lap and say 'Please love me' the way she did it. And she has so much pathos, she can take a piece of comedy and turn it around and break you up."

Natural Clown. Shirley is a "fringie" (part-time member) of "The Clan," an exclusive, halfway-out social clique headed by Sinatra and Dean Martin, and she is still frankly delighted by their attentions. "I'm shy and introverted with them, and wondering if I'm doing the right thing," she says. "I wouldn't presume to try to be anything but myself with them." The Clan, in turn, treats her as a sort of mascot. Says Clansman Peter Lawford: "She's a guy, a funny girl, a natural clown." Says Dean Martin: "She's also a great audience. She loves to laugh. I'd be the biggest hit in the world if I only had 500 like her in every audience." Adds Sinatra: "We have a kind of trust in each other. If Shirley tells me to read a book, I read it. I trust her taste and knowledge, and I think she trusts mine. She is kind of a kook, * but very warm."

If there are times when even The Clan cannot keep Shirley going, when she withdraws into a corner to stare at the wall or struggle with sudden tears, The Clan accepts this, too. Her sudden shifts of mood and attention are as striking offscreen as on. The core of her life, she insists, is her family, her Japan-based husband Steve Parker and her two-year-old daughter Stephanie. Friends still remember with a kind of awed surprise the evening she brought Steffie to a party, stuck the child in a wicker basket and put her in a closet to sleep. Later the party moved off in search of a progressive jazz pianist who was never found. Far later it wound up at a nightspot called the Crescendo. Steffie was still in the closet, sleeping peacefully.

Shirley has a way of forgetting all about herself, too. "When she saw Imitation of Life" recalls a friend, "she was moved to tears. Hours later, when she got home, she glanced in a mirror by accident and noticed her mascara streaked down her cheeks. She was upset because nobody had bothered to tell her, but most people would have looked in a mirror on purpose long before then."

At such evidence of her kookiness, a Clansman will shrug his shoulders and call her "a ring-a-ding," using a Clan word that stands for anything puzzling, hard to define, but generally wonderful.

This Togetherness Stuff. There are non-Clansmen in town whose attitude toward Shirley is somewhat more analytical. They focus on the calculation behind the talent, enjoy the "natural" comedienne but see the cool planning that makes her tick. They take pleasure in her company, as did the friend who squired her to Santa Anita one afternoon, smug in the knowledge that she had telephoned a gagwriter and announced: "I'm going to the races. Give me ten jokes on racing."

Calculated or casual, Shirley looks to a lot of Hollywood Toynbees like the start of a new cycle. Every so often, of course, a new ruler must move in to take over from tired hands and smile-weary faces, for Hollywood panders to every man's daydream of eternal youth. The guy in the air-cooled gloom of the theater grows older every year, but his dream girl is the same age always. The surprise is not that Shirley has moved to the top, but that she has been able to do it on her own terms without cheesecake, without studio supervised romances, even without a swimming pool. It could have happened only in a new Hollywood, which has found that kookiness can be more appealing than yesterday's gilded glamour. "It's this togetherness stuff, that's what it is," says Director Elia Kazan. "In the old days, with one or two exceptions, Hollywood girls couldn't be both sexy and funny. Nowadays they insist on being so-called complete women--healthy and natural. The new crop of actresses is dedicated to the proposition that the girl next door can also be sexy. They want to keep one eye on the baby and let the other eye rove."

The observation is interesting but debatable. Shirley's rivals are far more varied than "Gadge" Kazan suggests. The newcomers--and there seem to be more interesting ones in Hollywood these days than in years--are not necessarily all girl-next-door types, not all funny, not all "complete women." Inevitably, certain new Hollywood cliches have developed. Where it was preferable for yesterday's star to have been discovered at a soda fountain, it is better for today's model to have been found at the Actors' Studio. Where yesterday's glamour girl was expected to bathe in goat's milk, today's must dig Dostoevsky, or at least say she does. The sex goddess is a foreigner now--named Brigitte or Sophia--and Hollywood women seem to come in somewhat subtler shapes. And, at one time or another, they must all wear blue jeans. But under the blue jeans they are not kin.

Between the excellent Method acting of Academy Award Winner Joanne Woodward, 28, and the thinly silverplated style with which Martha Hyer, 34, attempts to replace Princess Grace, the town's new crop of females comes in assorted types and talents. Some examples:

Susan Kohner, 22, was born to the Hollywood purple. Her father, successful Agent Paul Kohner, provided a Bel Air home brightened with a portrait of Susan and her brother painted by a family friend, Diego Rivera, and other baubles to match. From her mother, Mexican Actress Lupita Tovar, she inherited liquid, tip-tilted eyes of striking beauty. As a Chinese girl on TV (Schlitz Playhouse), an Italian girl in To Hell and Back, a neurotic mulatto in Imitation of Life, she began her multicolored career as one of the most versatile young actresses in town. Her latest picture: Walt Disney's The Big Fisherman, in which she again plays an exotic part--a young Judean girl.

May Britt, 23, (married, no children), with her long, lovingly curved figure, long, Chablis-colored hair and lean, finely freckled legs, began her career, incredibly enough, playing the part of a boy. But Italian Producer Carlo Pond soon saw the error of his ways; he had not brought her from Stockholm for that. May (rhymes with sigh) came to California in 1957, made The Young Lions, The Hunters, and now, as a fresh young remake of Dietrich (without pretensions to a singing voice), she is remaking Blue Angel.

Carolyn Jones, 26 (married, no children), is a bop-talking hipster with a grim determination to do anything necessary to keep from going home to Amarillo. In the process she has had her nose bobbed, has dyed her hair brunette and fought her way through a series of gun-moll parts to meaty roles in The Bachelor Party and Marjorie Morningstar, and now in Career and Hole in the Head. A pop-eyed comedienne with a yen to play "just a plain girl," Carolyn also yearns for a place in the high-style Hollywood of sleek white limousines and sunken bathtubs. She is just about there. "We're coming into the golden age of the movies," she insists, "and that'll be a gas, boy."

Lee Remick, 23 (married, one child), is a well-heeled, self-possessed, finishing-school type. "I'm a lady, unashamedly," says Lee. "I never had to starve to death, and I could always afford to be choosy about parts." Being choosy kept her smooth, even features, her tawny blonde hair on TV until Elia Kazan made her a drum majorette in Face in the Crowd. Later she did The Long Hot Summer and a so-so western called Three Thousand Hills. Now she is stoking up for a personal appearance tour to promote her biggest and best part yet: the Army wife whose barroom flirtation results in rape and murder in Anatomy of a Murder.

Inger Stevens, 24, started right at the top. A cool, Nordic blonde with an oddly piquant mouth, she played the female leads in the only four movies she has made (Man on Fire; Cry Terror; The Buccaneer; The World, the Flesh, and the Devil). Dancing in the line at Manhattan's Latin Quarter paid for acting lessons with Lee Strasberg after her family came to the U.S. from Stockholm; then TV plays and summer stock primed her for Hollywood. Moody and shy about her Swedish accent, Inger, for all her fast start, is still mostly promise.

Diane Baker, 21, came to Los Angeles' Van Nuys High School ten years after Marilyn Monroe and sat at Marilyn's desk. There the similarity ends; compared to Marilyn's frank and proud carnal charm, Diane's fresh, almost solemn simplicity seems to belong to a teen-age prom. Ballet lessons, drama lessons, TV, modeling--all the standard preparation--got her ready to play Millie Perkins' sister in The Diary of Anne Frank. Now, in The Best of Everything, she will get a chance to prove that she can turn on something else besides slender, hazel-eyed girlishness.

Hope Lange, 24 (married, two children), is a Hollywood rarity, a fine actress who wears sincerity like a cameo. A good girl in Bus Stop, raped, kicked and beaten in Peyton Place, a glossy career girl in The Best of Everything, she can project whatever is asked for with the professional competence of an actress who started on the stage when she was twelve (in Sidney Kingsley's The Patriots). "A lot of people who are stars never have time to work out what they are doing," says she. "Acting is important to me, and I believe it is important to the world."

First Laugh. Hollywood's list includes actresses as impressive as Shirley Mac-Laine, dancers as skilled, singers as competent. If they thought it mattered, any of them could put on a passable imitation of her scorn for that Hollywood staple, the false front. Still, none of the new girls in town are up to MacLaine. Why?

The answer lies somewhere in the uncommon blend of luck, looks, talent, determination and good salt sweat that is the essence of Shirley's art. She has watched for the breaks and made them work for her ever since her first appearance onstage. It was at a dancing-school recital, and she was only four. "I had on a little green costume and looked like a fool four-leaf clover. I tripped on the curtain and fell down. That's when I got my first laugh. I liked it. I damn near fell down again--on purpose--but I knew my teacher would have killed me."

Such early dancing-school training suggests that Shirley was shoved toward the stage by ambitious parents. Not so. Her mother, Canadian-born Kathryn MacLean Beaty, was a dabbler in amateur theatricals, and her father, Ira O. Beaty, a scholarly Virginian, was a part-time musician, but the dancing lessons had a practical explanation: Shirley had weak ankles.

"I couldn't control them," says Shirley. "I walked like a duck, so Mother sent me to ballet school to strengthen them. I loved the freedom of expression in movement. From the time I was three, I kept telling Mother, 'I want to be a little dancing gal.' " When Shirley was eleven, her parents moved from Richmond, where she was born, to Arlington. A good teacher in Washington, Julia Mildred Harper, became the reason "I don't have muscles in my legs like most dancers. If you do a little jump, your automatic reaction is to put your heels up. If you have a teacher yelling every minute, 'No, get your heels down,' the muscles in your calves stay long and supple." The north half of Shirley's body, she admits, "is not exactly Marilynish. In the movies and on TV, they always try to make me look bigger. But if I augment myself up there, people won't notice my legs, and my legs are supposed to be very nice."

What Can I Do? By the time she got to junior high, Shirley was already bothered by her height. "I've been 5 ft. 7 in. since I was twelve. I was always the tallest, skinniest kid in the class." Shirley was an accomplished tomboy; she could play ball better (outfield) and run the 100-yd. dash faster than most boys. The fiery red hair and a mass of freckles did not help with the boys. "I thought. 'What can I do about those freckles? I can't wash them away. There must be something else boys like in girls.' But when I did meet other boys, they always felt I put my stage ambitions first--and it was true."

During one recital, "I did a classical Spanish dance to Malaguena. The button on my petticoat popped, and it slipped down further and further and further. I heard everybody laughing and looked down, saw the petticoat, threw the castanets away, pulled the petticoat off, used it like a matador's cape and went into a comedy routine. It was like Cantinflas. The audience roared. I thought, 'They liked it. They laughed. They understood me.' "

Subway Circuit. Summers, while she was still in high school. Shirley studied ballet in Manhattan. When she was 17, she decided she was ready to join a classical ballet company. "Then," says she, "I got smart and didn't. I've got huge feet, and when I get en pointe, it adds twelve inches to my 5 ft. 7 in. It's hysterical--and Charles Atlas is dead." * She got a job in a subway-circuit company of Oklahoma! She was only a chorus girl, but "I thought, 'Dammit, I'm just plain happier here than I would be in a ballet company.' I was certain that I wanted musical comedy. I knew I would be good."

After graduation from high school, Shirley scorned the idea of going to college ("It was too limiting"). She changed her name to MacLaine--no one ever pronounced her own name, Beaty, or her mother's maiden name, MacLean, correctly--and went back to Manhattan. "I wanted to go out and see what was going on. My parents were willing to support me, but I wouldn't take any money from them. I lived on very little, had twelve roommates in one year. They were all looking for husbands and careers. I left the Ferguson girls' club because you had to be in by 11:30." The club was probably not sorry. Shirley and her pals used to amuse themselves by dressing up in outrageous costumes, sitting on the porch and squirting passers-by with water pistols.

"You with the Legs." Shirley's eating spot was the Automat. "I am innately so economical," she explains, "that a lot of people say I'm tight. But in the Automat you could get peanut butter sandwiches on raisin bread for a dime. You could get an iced-tea glass with a lemon in it free, go to the fountain, put water in it, get sugar at the table and have as many free lemonades as you wanted. Of course I had to change Automats pretty often."

Then Shirley heard that Rodgers and Hammerstein were auditioning for a new show, Me and Juliet. She tried out for the chorus and was turned down. ("There were maybe ten million people, each expected to sing, dance, do cartwheels and manufacture their own fog.") Shirley was so sure that R. & H. had made a mistake that she borrowed a friend's Equity card and tried again. She was turned down once more. The third time, Dick Rodgers got a good look at her. "You with the legs," he called, and she was hired.

The Test. Next season, when Juliet's director, George Abbott, began work on Pajama Game, he brought Shirley. Shrewdly, she sized up the show, decided that she would be a better understudy for Carol Haney than the girl who had been chosen, chopped her hair off short like Carol's ("I stuffed a pillow with what I cut off") and asked for the job. She got it. Then, a cliches coming true, just three days after the show opened on Broadway, Carol Haney broke her ankle. Shirley was in. Just three days after that, Hollywood Producer Hal Wallis offered her a contract at $200 a week. Shirley got an agent who held out for $600. and Wallis countered with a demand for a screen test.

The test became a classic. Almost without makeup, dressed in a brief sweater, even briefer shorts and long black stockings, Shirley did a couple of bits from Pajama Game--minus music. For the rest of the time, the camera closed in on her mobile, expressive face, the fine, frank mouth that can play a thousand variations on a smile, the curious, inquisitive eyes at once disarming and discerning. Off-camera, the soft, insistent voice of Director Danny Mann conducted an interview. "Tell me about yourself. What do you really want to do?" That smile again, then a short, pert shrug of the lips as if any sensible character really should have known. "Comedy," said Shirley. "Comedy with real good acting."

Actors Are Cattle. Director Mann came away convinced she could do just that. "That test was animal-like in its naturalness," says he. "A searing inquiry with no pretense of being sophisticated." Another director who saw the test and agreed was Alfred Hitchcock. He saw it and signed her to play in The Trouble with Harry. Shirley came on Vermont location slightly more sophisticated than when she left Broadway, but "Hitch" finished the picture convinced that Shirley was "unique--which belongs to the making of a star, the rare quality we want." This was high praise from a man who boasts that "I have little personal relationship with actors. All actors are cattle." * Just before making Harry, Shirley eloped with Steve Parker, an unemployed actor with an urge to wheel and deal as a producer. Now Steve is in the Orient doing just that, making TV packages and movie shorts. ("He's a very rich man in yen," Shirley insists to doubting friends. "When he gets rolling, his business will make my operations look sick.") When Shirley made Around the World, she got to Japan herself; when she took time out to have a baby, she named her Stephanie Sachiko, to demonstrate that she shared Steve's love for the Orient. The baby slowed her down not a bit. She made Hot Spell, a good picture but not much of a box-office splash, showed up on the Sheepman set "somewhat trepidatious" for her first western. She was togged in immaculate jeans, spotless cowgirl hat, shiny boots. "I was the only gal in the picture," she says. "Director George Marshall threw a couple of fistfuls of dirt all over my new clothes. In the first minute all of them knocked me down, rolled me in the dirt and said, 'O.K., now you can play a western.' " A few minutes later, Shirley doused her tormentors with a bucket of water. "Wouldn't you like to cool off, Charlie?" she asked. "From then on, they knew I wasn't a prima donna exactly, and whatever they wanted to say, they went right ahead. The language, oh golly!"

Nickels & Dimes. For all her clowning and her casualness. Shirley is as serious about money as the Bank of America. She is sure that Producer Wallis is exploiting her, and the idea is galling. ("I'm a very good business woman and I don't like to be hooked.") When Wallis paid her only $15,000 to play in Running, she almost backed out of the picture, refused to show up on the set until the day before shooting began. As Walk's tells it, he is entitled to a profit for taking a chance on a newcomer; furthermore, he says, Shirley was amply repaid, got bonuses and was treated royally. "I went up to her on the set during the week of her birthday," Wallis recalls, "and asked: 'If I was going to give you a birthday present, what would you like?' Shirley said, kiddingly, 'An MG.' " Next day Wallis handed her the keys. "She broke up and cried and laughed. And that cost more than nickels and dimes."

Shirley remembers it differently, indignantly denies that she was kidding when she asked for the car. "When you're talking to a man with 44 million dollars," snaps Shirley, "you're not joking."

She is equally hardheaded about the rest of her career, always keeping track of the intricate plan she has long since worked out. When she quit ballet, she knew that she still needed dancing to get ahead, so she continued her lessons. Acting lessons she refused. Says she, with supreme self-confidence: "I was afraid they would change me." Now she has signed for Can-Can, because "for my career I should do a musical now." The decision was complicated by the fact that dancing makes Shirley actively ill. She has an imbalance in the canals of her inner ear and gets travel sick as well. "Even if I'm in shape," says she, "I get sick when I'm doing a new step. To know you're going to get sick every day--I'd rather have a baby."

Just Deserts. Apart from talent, persistence and visual charm, what makes Shirley MacLaine a real ring-a-ding is her conversation. "Her candor has a whisper of regret and apology if she thinks she may hurt you," says Playwright Clifford Odets, "but she will say anything." Some non-whispered, non-regretted items:

P: On New York Times Critic Bosley Crowther--"Dean of critics! Nonsense! He's like he is because he's insecure. He likes the sexpots; that shows you where his taste lies. And I went and bought the s.o.b. a lunch. I threw up for four hours."

P: On religion--"I'm an orthodox coward."

P:On parties--"I go to cocktail parties every six months. Then I get sick on Seven-Up. At formal dinner parties, I'm forever making terrible mistakes. Sometimes they don't invite me back."

P: On entertaining--"I don't know how. We owe people dinner from ten years back. But they keep asking us." P: On Method acting--"Not for me. In Hot Tin Roof I felt the actors were wading through two feet of dirt and Tennessee Williams was loving it."

P: Spoofing the typical Hollywood reporter question about what she sleeps in--"It depends on who I'm with."

Says Shirley, as if to explain herself: "This is a time of individuals in motion pictures. Movies are not made on the grand scale that they used to be--and neither are people. The movies are looking for something different and special, and I'm a combination of too many things to be part of a trend. When I see a door open, I walk through it. I'm sure not going to beat it down. I'm going along the crest now, and I'm enjoying the ride. I've got everything I want, and I don't think everything's happened too fast. Hell, no. I think I deserve it."

* Meaning, roughly, screwball. Pronounced to rhyme not with book but with fluke.* Actually, Charles Atlas is hale and muscular at 66, and an admirer of Shirley. "She is a very fine, clean woman," says he. "I wish she could join me when I'm out running." * The first time Hitchcock indulged in this devastating comment was just before shooting a picture with Carole Lombard. He arrived on the set to begin shooting and found his leading lady waiting for him, leading three cows. * Who, in his review of Ask Any Girl, thought the other girls appeared "more worthy of land ing guys," deplored her "plain lack of chic," and dismissed her as "one-half a dame."

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